AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX Review: 24 Cores on a Budget

Workstation Compute and Graphics

Workstation Compute

Many workstation applications scale very well with additional cores in certain workloads or with special plugins, but the result is always the sum of many factors and tasks in which the pure computing power of all the cores is important, but even so also not crucial. Often enough, the parallelizable tasks do not scale beyond a certain number of cores / threads, so IPC will co-decide. And that's not the advantage of AMD.

Image 1 of 6

The dynamic mode of the Ryzen TR 2970WX is another such thing in its own right, because between the individual iterations of a benchmark (between 3 and 5, depending on the application), it sometimes comes to very clear differences. We can only explain it again with the missing memory controller, since many AVX- and SSE-optimized codes (but not only those) depend on memory bandwidth. And when a software solution such as Dynamic Mode intervenes, the well-intentioned can sometimes turn into the opposite.

Workstation Graphics

While workstation graphics are a niche for most readers, some might consider using Threadripper 2970WX's twelve cores and 24 threads for professional tasks. Really, though, there aren't many threaded applications for real-time graphics output. These benchmarks mostly benefit from high IPC and frequency, which isn’t one of Threadripper’s inherent strengths. The results are not bad, but also not outstanding.

Image 1 of 9

Nevertheless, there are also applications that have to calculate in parallel and are grateful for every additional thread. AutoCAD is just an example of the clock dependence of fewer threads when it comes to pure 2D drafting or real-time 3D graphics output. The graphic performance is very reminiscent of the general result in gaming, it doesn’t matter if you use DirectX, OpenGL, or just the Windows GDI.

MORE: Best CPUs

MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy

MORE: All CPUs Content